


just three weeks

by eldersmcpriceley



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Anxiety, Depression, Fluff, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Schizophrenia, Tumblr, Turrets - Freeform, attempted suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-05-11 20:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5641156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldersmcpriceley/pseuds/eldersmcpriceley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>we are not who you think we are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: i have not been diagnosed with any of these conditions so i don't have first hand experience. if anything i say that is offensive or inaccurate please please please tell me! don't be afraid:)
> 
> this was based off a post by sorryimessedupagain on tumblr that i found on twitter. i thought that the idea of stereotypes on people with mental illnesses were something that needed to be lifted and writing is the only way i feel comfortable.
> 
> also i am not trying to romanticise the idea of mental illness. of course there are couples and relationships in the fiction but try and focus as the characters as a person.

sorryimessedupagain:

I spent three weeks in a mental hospital and what I discovered there I feel like should be put into words.

we are not who you think we are.

the boy with turrets told the funniest jokes.

the girl who raked her nails up and down her skin could create the most exquisite drawings.

the girl who abused drugs had the wisest soul.

the boy with schizophrenia had the biggest heart.

the girl who trued to kill herself told the boy with insomnia stories to help lure him to sleep.

the boy who wanted to kill himself had the deepest passion for cooking.

the girl with slits and scars all over her body dried my tears and told me i was beautiful.

the boy with anger issues gave the warmest hugs.

the girl with bulimia told everyone every day that they looked beautiful in their bodies.

the boy who was a compulsive liar told us that he wanted ua all to get better and that he was for once telling the truth.

the girl who almost drank herself to death stood up for anyone that felt they were feeling bullied.

the boy with social anxiety made sure nobody sat alone at meals.

we are not who you think we are.


	2. intro

Louis was normal.

However, every day his youngest twin sister, Daisy, came home pale as her sheets and a throbbing headache pulsing through her brain. She'd go straight to bed and not eat until the next morning. Louis, like any brother, tried to help of course whilst his mother was worried sick about her daughter but nothing was to help. That same month she was taken into hospital and told she had an incurable blood poisoning caused by meningitis.

That's how Louis got onto the roof of his semi-detached house in Doncaster on the last night of his sisters life. 

It had taken him a short matter of fifteen minutes to find a bottle of gin and be sat cross legged looking over the glittering lights of the city. He wasn't new to this game, he'd partied harder with friends in the club, taking a new person home every night, but it was a different case this time. He looked at his feet, moved to the skyline and back at the bottle, repeated a few times before someone came out of the house below him to pull him down.

"Louis William, what are you doing up there?" His mum shouted up with her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her new born. Louis giggled and shouted back down.

"What are you doing down there?" He gargled with drink in his mouth, "Wait, don't tell me."

His mum scowled up at him, the shadow on her face casting multiple contours that Louis apparently found hilarious. He threw his head back and laughed up to the black sky before another voice was heard.

"Lou?" His ill sister called, her voice fragile. The older woman was ushering her back into the warmth of their fire heated home however she set one eye on the her brother and was stuck to the ground. "Get down, what are you doing?"

Louis only then realised where he was, panicked and forgot how to get down until he saw a wooden ledge protruding from the house wall. He threw one leg forward and his whole body came crashing down before him. The tiles caught onto his clothes and then tore away from the roof. He felt one hit to his head and then the blurs of his hometown became a deep blue, turning into an infinite black.

.x.

His head was throbbing, beeps grind his brain before cascading out of the other ear. A warmth was in one hand, in the other was a pricking sensation until it has gone. The solid beneath him was almost brick like, however it had some spring about it. The warmth caught up to his head, opening his eyes into a white room of sleepy faces, all he recognised, however missing one to complete his family.

"Wakey," The warmth said, his mother smiling down at him with a sense of grief in the room. Everyone was looking to their hands in their pyjama covered laps. He felt a fresh sight of the world, as though a weight had been lifted.

"What is going on?" He asked, the white noise was killing him, almost as much as his fall.

His fall. 

He looked down to his right arm, a cast holding it into place and his leg lift by something above the bed. 

"Don't worry, they are minor injuries, you'll be playing footie in the next three months," Dan, his step dad, nodded with a quick smile, "You gave us a fright, lucky to not be in a coma apparently."

Would a coma be better, though, nothing really to worry about, he probably wouldn't even realise a difference.

"Not as lucky as Dais, though," A young voice weeped in the corner.

"Where is Daisy?" He looked around, even the babies were there, silent and sleeping, however still radiating sorrow.

Most shed a tear, and if they didn't they were comforting someone who was.

Louis gulped, breathes heavily but didn't cry. "She wanted me to hold her hand."

The family cried together.

The next day Louis was realised from the white walls of the hospital and was being pushed by Dan in his new wheelchair. He had an appointment due that week with a professional physiologist to talk about his intentions but of course he'd pass with flying colours. Of course.

He wasn't having a good day. The family were planning a funeral for Daisy while trying to help Louis with everything from getting dressed to showering. It was manic and people cried and Louis felt shameful. He had to be dressed well for the woman he was meeting- a Mrs Smith- but all he could fit in was his old tracksuit bottoms and short sleeve shirts that were a size too big with a stain where his left hip sat.

As he was being wheeled into the familiar hospital he saw children as young as 10 sitting around, waiting for a deduction of there sanity. He was defiantly the oldest.

"Mr Tomlinson."

Louis looked round to Dan, waited until he was stood and took a deep breath. He was wheeled in and left alone with a smartly dressed woman. He slouched in his wheelchair at her desk in the centre of the office.

"So, I expect you know why you're here?" She was looking down at her papers before finishing her sentence and looked over her thin glasses.

"You want to put me in a mental hospital."


	3. part 1

Louis took the woman's deduction as an insult. He didn't try to kill himself, sure he had issues as a teenager but never suicidal thoughts.

She - Mrs Smith - took one good look at his wrist with white lines on and wrote on her paper 'history with suicide'. After that it was as if she gave up asking him questions.

She followed behind him out of the bare room, pushing him along and shook his parents hands, leading them to a corner to speak over the decision as if it was going to secret between them only. The convocation lasted two minutes before they were signing documents and working out a schedule between their work life.   
Suddenly, Louis felt like a burden.

After a week, a room was ready, beds made and all, for Louis to move into his new home. His suitcase was packed with clothes a size too big for him and he was whisked away to a hospital half an hour from his house. Everything seemed rushed but the drive seemed torturously slow and dull. As they parked up, young people walked in and out, some out in a colourless garden beside the main building which was guarded by a blue fence topped with barbed wire. Charming, Louis thought.

The building itself was tall and thin, like a large chimney. The name was branded about six feet up from the floor on the front wall in blue writing painted on the dark red bricks, cemented together with a pale white paste. 

"We'll get you settled in then we'll be off," His mother smiled as she guided him up the long pathway, a hand on his back as if she was stopping him from running back to the car. Her personality had changed drastically after the accident. She'd become more alert, watching Louis as if she was studying him for a project. 

The woman at the counter was old, possibly older than the building. She handed him a key and a younger man came out from the white door beside the desk and took Louis' suitcase no started rummaging through the pockets for his jacket for objects.

"If I were to keep something do you really think I'd put it in my suitcase?" Louis smirked when the man looked up at him from the floor with a curious look on his face before diving up to Louis' chest, searching his body then through his hair and socks, "That didn't mean I had anything."

The man huffed and walked back into his room before his mum turned him and around, holding his shoulders and looking at him in the eye returning with tired, worn orbs, "I'll be back in just three weeks."

"Thanks," Louis nodded, loosening from her grasp and picking up any lost belonging from the floor and pulling the bag behind him, "See you soon."

He followed the signs on the walls to where he expected he would be staying however he ended up standing in front of a large wooden door complimented by coloured glass windows.

"I pray you send my family - fuck - all the love I can give them - cunt - while here, amen."

Louis jumped at first not knowing someone was around the corner of the small church. Before he could stick his head 'round the corner to ask for directions a boy, around seventeen, with dirty blond hair, dark brown roots and bright eyes came out holding a book under his elbow. At first Louis thought he hadn't noticed him then the boys head twitched in a way Louis had only seen on television documentaries and looked him in the face. He smiled, flashing his silver braces at Louis.

"Hey, I don't think we've met," The boy spoke, his voice was different to that he heard shouting and he had a distinct accent that Louis could almost read as his lips moved, "Are you new?"

"Yeah, I am," Louis stumbled over his words forgetting that someone asked him a question. The boy held his hand up and Louis was about to take it when the pale hand pulled upwards in a distorted fashion before returning to its original place.

"Shit! - I'm Niall, I've been here for sometime," He, Niall, introduced himself as he finally touched Louis' hand and shook it with an energy that was only Irish, "You'll get used to people like me."

"Wait, sorry, how are you so calm?" Louis blurted out, he'd never met someone so outgoing and accepting of himself. Niall chuckled, it seemed he'd heard the question more than once.

"You are one of the two people - Ah - to tell me that this week," He let his hand go beside his leg again and it twitched again but Niall seemed to control it, fisting his hand together and flexing, "I don't think I caught your name?"

"Louis, sorry," Louis breathed out a short lived laugh and took a look down at the book hidden under Niall's arm, "What've you been reading?"

"Passages from the bible," Niall nodded, "I grew up in a strict household so they calm me down." Louis knew nothing about religion apart from his year 7 EPR class about the Christmas story. 

"Were you lost?" Niall interrupted Louis' thoughts his query, he'd almost forgot why he was here.

"Yeah, I'm supposed to be in room 12, ward 4 but I must has misdirected." Louis explained.

"No problem, I know exactly where it is," Niall bound down the corridor leaving Louis to catch up after him. There were lost of sharp turns as Niall explain the history of a place so dark and gloomy and added some of his own history in it too.

"This is as far as I can take you, but room 12 is at the end on the left I believe," He nodded and turned around before looking back at Louis, "I'm in room 23, ward 6 if you need me. Just ask the lady at the desk for me, we're friends."

Before Louis could register any information Niall was gone with a wink and Louis was left at the end of ward 4. He couldn't help but think Niall might just make his trip worthy of being a little sad.


End file.
